Tag Archives for " Oopsies "

We’ve all done it — there’s already a WordPerfect document that you need some text out of (a letter addressee, a section out of a brief, whatever), so you decide to cut-and-paste from WordPerfect into your current Word document.

Have you ever typed a few dashes in between paragraphs (as a placeholder or whatever), hit enter, and somehow wound up with a line all the way across the page that you can’t get rid of, no matter how many times you hit the Delete key?

One of the tactics I regularly recommend to users when transferring content from an old WordPerfect document is to use Paste, Special, Unformatted Text instead of just the plain Paste or CNTRL-V commands:

The advantage here is that Paste Special clears out all of the formatting so the newly-pasted text doesn’t mess up your nice Microsoft Word document.

The disadvantage? Well … it clears out all the formatting. And this can be a pain to re-do, particularly if you’ve got a long document with lots of case citations, etc.

What to do? Here are three tricks to keep in your Microsoft Word skills arsenal.

If you have a brief, etc., in Word 2007 in which a footnote drops down to a subsequent page (the number mark within the main text is on p. 2, but all or part of the footnote text keeps dropping down to p. 3), here’s how to fix it:

Click the Office Button (top left-hand corner)

Click Word Options (at bottom of menu)

Go to Advanced

Scroll all the way down until you see Compatibility Options

In the drop-down next to “Lay out this document as if created in:” choose Microsoft Office Word 2007 (like illustration below)

Sometimes, our Word documents (particularly when they’ve been generated by our time & billing software) leave huge gaps of white space between a heading and the text that’s supposed to go right under it by mysteriously breaking the page right after the heading.

Except, there’s no page break! No one’s inserted a hard page break anywhere — the document’s just stubbornly refusing to put text that will clearly fit on page 1 on page 2.

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